We get worn down during election season. And sometimes we expect the worst.

So I was cynical when a date-rape victim spoke out last week against Ken Buck.

The timing — weeks before voters decide whether to send the Weld County district attorney to the U.S. Senate — bothered me.

All I could see were the bad facts in her case. I figured she had a grudge against the guy who wouldn’t prosecute her former lover for having sex with her, drunk and unconscious, after she invited him to her apartment.

All I could hear was the angry whining of the Senate race, the din of the liberal smear machine and the white noise of my own assumptions.

I admit I didn’t get it.

But then I spoke with her — a 26-year-old whose name I have a responsibility not to print. That’s the thing about rape victims. It’s tough to give a voice to people who hide, however understandably, in shadows.

If you stay on the line long enough, you can tell things over the phone. This isn’t a woman trying to convince anyone of anything. All she wants is what she has been demanding for five years: that Buck explain why he refused to press charges.

“The victim was barely conscious and that’s when he realized he had done something wrong,” reads the police report. “He stated at that point he realized what he had done and said he felt shame and regret.”

The apparent admission wasn’t enough for Buck. He was hung up on the victim’s relationship with her attacker. And that she had been drinking and invited him over.

“I’m telling you that’s what the circumstances suggest to people, including myself, who have looked at it. Although you never said the word yes. But the appearance is of consent,” Buck told her in 2006.

Like it or not, the law on date rape is clear. Having sex with someone who’s blotto is illegal. It seems Buck didn’t read that far into the statutes.

Later, he told The Greeley Tribune that a jury might conclude the case was one of “buyer’s remorse,” whatever that means. He since has had the nerve to call the facts of the case “pitiful.”

His apologists argue that voters should laud Buck for not wasting tax dollars prosecuting a case he might not win. In as patronizing a comment as I’ve heard from any campaign, one booster told me Buck was protecting the victim from having to air her sexual history.

“I don’t need his protection,” she tells me. “I need him to understand what date rape is about.”

One of four women in the U.S. has been sexually assaulted. Of those, somewhere between 73 percent and 90 percent knew their attackers.

It didn’t take this dust-up to realize that Buck is pitiful on women’s issues, including his opposition to abortion in rape cases.

“Here’s a man who colludes in a system that invisiblizes and victimizes women,” says Moshe Rozdzial, a Denver therapist who co-chairs the National Organization for Men Against Sexism.

Regardless of whether Buck should have thrown the book in this case, the victim needs to be heard — both about her attack and her outcry against the district attorney who blamed her for it.

“Whether or not you know my name,” she says, “I’m still out here waiting for answers.”

Last month, Denver’s Department of Safety fired a deputy sheriff for using racial slurs and harassing inmates and a police sergeant for drinking while in uniform and abandoning a post to have sex with a woman.

A wedding and special events’ planning business has agreed to pay a $200,000 settlement to five employees living in the country illegally after allegedly failing to pay them minimum wages and overtime and discriminating against them because of their race.